Wednesday, June 04, 2008

Indians studying abroad

Check out this wonderful table with data on international student mobility, with a country-wise break-up for in-coming and out-going students. Where do Indian students go? Here are the figures for 2005:

Country

Number

USA

84,044

Australia

20,515

UK

16,685

Germany

4,339

New Zealand

1,563

Others

12,077

Total

139,223

One of the more interesting pieces of information in that table is about the recepient countries. If you normalize the number of foreign students in a country by its overall population, the UK, Australia, France, Germany, and New Zealand score higher than the US! For example, UK has about a fifth of the population of the US, but hosts over half as many foreign students (318,000) as does the US (590,000).

* * *

There has been quite a bit of discussion in the press about how the US has not been the preferred destination for IIT graduates; here's the latest. Apparently, before 2001, over a third of them went to the US (primarily for higher studies, I think); this number has been dropping steadily, with 84 percent of the 2008 graduates choosing to stay in India.

IIT graduates may be saying no to the US, but a whole lot of others are saying yes, and their number is increasing by the year! This Boston Globe report says that the number of Indian students in the US has doubled in the last decade to over 83,000 last year. If recent numbers prove durable, over 70,000 of them would be in graduate schools.

The same Boston Globe report goes on to say that the University of Southern California is home to the largest foreign student population -- over 7,100 -- among the US universities. Indians alone account for over 1,500 of them. To put this number in perspective, consider this:

More than 1,500 Indian citizens are full-time students at USC, only about 100 fewer than the number of black students at the school.

Abi: why have these rude commentators suddenly shown up on Nanopolitan? A blog first and foremost is for the blogger and in what is still a free world (at least in some parts), one can blog about whatever one wants. No one is forcing others to read your blog or any other. You could, of course, take revenge by turning off comments or moderating comments. Anant